The tribesman

Former marine Bruce Parry has become something of a national treasure since he started hanging out with tribal communities for his BBC show The Tribe. Here he talks to Sam Wollaston about all the important stuff: ethics, women, cannibalism ...

The tribesman

Former marine Bruce Parry has become something of a national treasure since he started hanging out with tribal communities for his BBC show The Tribe. Here he talks to Sam Wollaston about all the important stuff: ethics, women, cannibalism ...

Monday 17 September 2007 02.40 EDT
First published on Monday 17 September 2007 02.40 EDT

For my interview with Bruce Parry I went to his village in Ibiza. He knew I was coming, but still I was a bit apprehensive, approaching his farmhouse, wondering what sort of reception I would get. I had brought with me an outboard motor and some petrol as payment for having me, though I was careful not to let the neighbours see - in case they got jealous and it upset the delicately balanced societies of the Ibizan hills.

As it happens, Bruce was very welcoming. He said I could stay with him, in his house, sleeping on the wooden floor next to him. And I stayed for a month, living with Bruce, doing what Bruce does. When he went hunting, I went hunting - though I did not encourage him to go hunting, for the sake of my article. I ate his food, the same bland food every day. We took hallucinogenic drugs together, and danced.

I may have rearranged the chronology of events for the article, to make it a better story, but I have not made anything up ... well, apart from all of the above, which is total rot, apart from the bit about him living in Ibiza.

It is what I should have done though, because that is what he does. Parry, 38, is the Tribe guy; he goes and lives with tribal communities around the world - in Africa, in South America, in the frozen wastes of Greenland, the Himalayas and in the steamy jungles of south-east Asia - for the successful BBC programme, currently in its third series.

Because of time limitations, we had to make do with an hour at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington, west London, instead, with maps and stuffy old portraits of explorer chaps on the walls, and not a hallucinogenic drug in sight. We did talk about drugs though, and about all the other important stuff: women, cannibalism, ethics, the big message, a bit about Bruce Parry, television.

Drugs

"Let's get this straight," says Parry, laughing (he's always laughing, though he might be cross behind the laugh). "I'm not necessarily into hallucinogens."

In Tribe we have twice seen him totally out of it after taking terrifying jungle narcotics - once in Venezuela where the Sanema people blew hallucinogenic tree sap up his nose, and again with the Babongo in Gabon, where he wept during a drug-fuelled rebirthing ceremony.

"No, I don't think we should all be taking acid. I think drugs are very dangerous. But I do think I learned from those two experiences. I really had an incredibly deep message that came to me. I'm not saying it came from some deity, but when you do lose your mind - if that's what you want to call it - it's a really interesting way of looking at the self." He talks about having extra-ordinary revelations, seeing things in a totally different way, of becoming more connected to nature. He sounds more like an old hippy than someone who was brought up in a very traditional Christian family in Hampshire, and went to Wells Cathedral School before becoming an officer in the Royal Marines.

Women

The one thing he will not do with his hosts is get off with them. "To me, it's been very clear from the beginning. If I'm going to go in there and be friends with these people, and live like they do, and learn from them, then the one thing I'm not going to do is instill jealousy by trying to hit on girls."

He tells me of occasions he has been hit on - including by a man. But also of a time when he was with the Matis tribe in the Amazon, talking about relationships with a bunch of the women, and the director asked, jokingly, from behind the camera, if they thought Parry would make a good husband. And the women thought these two strangers were hitting on them, and for the next two days all the men there treated them totally differently and suspiciously. "And it just proved to me my premise was right: I shouldn't get involved."

Parry does not currently have a girlfriend.

Cannibalism

Apart from sex, anything goes. He is with them, so he will do what they do, eat what they eat. Even it is human flesh? "I probably would, actually. I don't see it as the great taboo it seems to be in our society. Cannibalism is only eating the flesh of your own species, so people who eat placentas are cannibals, and that happens all the time."

He has not faced that particular dilemma, though he did stay with the West Papuan Kombai tribe, who occasionally eat male witches. "They believe that male witches do evil, and in their philosophy the soul is contained within the stomach. So once he's been killed, if they were just to cremate or bury that person, the evil would continue. They eat the brain and the stomach, and then they chop off the limbs and put them round various parts of the territory."

He points out that it very rarely happens, and that the Kombai are some of the nicest people he has ever lived with. And also that it is their judicial system - finding men guilty of being witches, and condemning them to death - that is perhaps more problematic than what happens to their bodies afterwards.

Ethics

"People always ask if we're exploiting people, or changing them," he says, after I have asked him exactly that. He is adamant they exploit no one. They pay their way, the tribes are happy with their side of the bargain, sorry when the circus leaves town afterwards.

Change is more difficult. "Of course we change them a little bit, but we have to ask whether change is good or not, and that's a big old issue in its own right. As long as it's done correctly and they are aware of what's going to happen to them, then there's nothing wrong with that either."

I want to know what the anthropology community has made of it all. Initially, the reaction wasn't great. "They were thinking: if there's one idea for a programme we don't want made, then it's this. The mere thought of a non-anthropologist who doesn't speak the language going in and living with tribal communities for a month was absolutely abhorrent to the anthropology world. After seeing it, many softened. Some of the anthropologists still don't massively like it, but there's quite a lot of discussion among their own ranks about what the right thing is. They haven't got a unified voice. I think most of them who look at it freely and openly see it for what it is. I've never pretended that I'm an anthropologist, we've never pretended that this is ethnography; this is just an ordinary guy, going in and living with a particular group in an ethical way, and that's it. We're not pretending it's the last word on anyone."

The big message

We are all the same, essentially, beneath our penis sheaths and our Man United tops. This show is not just about tribal communities, says Parry, it is also a reflection of our own. "To me, it's all about society - looking at other ways we can live our lives, where we got it right and where we went awry." Man.

Bruce Parry

He is small, and wiry, and interested in everything, his eyes stretched open to try to take more in. He has got on with all the tribes he has visited, and it is easy to see why. "I'm a gregarious guy," he says, smiling as ever. "I like people by and large and I like to see the good in people."

He has had a whole lot of jobs since leaving the marines - student, expedition leader, film location manager, runner. So is that it now, he's going to be a television personality? "I don't know. I'm not married to it. The irony of my life is that I go out and learn about all these positive things, reconnecting with these people who have real community, family values, stress-free living, joie de vivre, things it's quite hard to find in our society. So learning all about that, and coming back to the UK and entering into a sort of minor celebrity culture, which is all a bit strange in its own right, and everyone wanting a piece of me - my life getting faster and faster and faster when all I want to do is slow it down and put into practice all these lessons I've learned ... So my understanding and my actual life are going in completely different directions."

Television

I want to know how it is made, how much is made up. Typically, there will be around five or six people on a crew - a director who may also operate the camera, a couple of assistant producers, a fixer, a translator, maybe a cook. After filming Parry's arrival, they will set up their own camp, a few hundred metres outside the village. Parry will stay here for the first couple of days, while the elders have their debates about who he will stay with etc. During this time, they may come in and film, but Bruce will not be living in the village. Then he moves in, and stays there for the whole time. Doesn't he ever nip back to the crew camp for a beer?

"I do go and see the crew. Normally, for the first week I do everything with the tribal community, so I can put my hand on my heart and say I have lived with them. After that, I will sometimes go and have the occasional meal with the crew, I have had the occasional beer with the crew, but I never live with them, because that would just be rude to my hosts. This programme is about them, not about whether I can hack it or not as a tough guy. I will take my malaria pills, because I can do that without them seeing, so it doesn't make a them-and-us situation. I hope their perspective of me is always that I'm doing what they're doing. So if they go for a shit in the woods, come back and hand me a bit of food, I will eat it. For me, to wash it, get my gel out and clean my hands, would just be wrong. My thing is I want to make friends with these people and the best way to do that is to be respectful and do what they do."

He reckons they have come out of the whole recent makey-uppy TV thing with their heads held high, and everything you see is as it was. But he - they - must have, at the back of their minds the whole time, that they are making television that has to be entertaining. "Yes, of course, and I'm always talking to the director, but there's never a script, I'm never told what to say. We do sometimes do things twice, but we never ask the tribe to do things twice. No, that's not true - we do occasionally, only if it's a minor thing. We don't manipulate, we never ask them to take their western T-shirts off, we just do it right, we do it ethically. I think we do it very well."

It must get boring, sometimes, when he is in the village on his own at night, unable to speak to his hosts. "Really, really dull, sitting on my own, with this wonderful family doing their thing around me. As soon as the fire goes down, I can't even do sign language, so I'm sitting there staring into the dark, knowing I'm going to have to lie down on a bloody wooden floor and try to go to sleep. I earn my money in those moments".

· The Tribe is on Tuesdays on BBC2 at 9pm. Series 1-3 are available on DVD from October 1, priced £34.99.